Frank was a snob. Snobs are full of bullying opinions, but snobs are not strong. They’re insecure and unreliable, they’re usually liars. Snobs will agree to anything, no matter how implausible, as long as it gives them an advantage, something extravagant to boast about; and because they can be tempted that way, they’re easily manipulated. Snobs are less substantial than they appear. And yet, with their crass ambition, pathetic as they are, they can still succeed in their wish to hurt your feelings, they can inflict pain, they can cause unhappiness. The snob thrives best among the minor differences of a small town and is always an annoyance, and often harmful, and sometimes a cancer.
It was not Frank’s snobbery that pained me. I knew that his insults and affected air of superiority were examples of his weakness. But in his lies and legal strategies he had cornered me with debt, he was an obstacle to my living my life. But his boasts showed that he was hollow and gave me an advantage. I could tempt him away from his office; I’d bait him with a possible boast, then I’d abduct him and take him away. Where to take him and how to kill him were questions I’d soon answer. My imagination convinced me that I was capable of anything. In spite of his obnoxious snobbery, and his reputation for collecting huge contingency fees, Frank was important in Littleford, respected for being feared, known to be dangerous.
It seemed that only Chicky Malatesta had stood up to him, but Chicky was dead. There was, however, a Littleford man who was feared and respected more than Frank, my Littleford High School friend Melvin Yurick. I’d known him well. I’d been a restless student in school, preferring to go for hikes in the nearby woods to staying in my room and doing the homework that came easy to me, a natural Eagle Scout and a geek. One of my satisfactions in school was that Yurick, a fellow geek, fellow Boy Scout, was as uninterested in sports as I was, and as dedicated to losing himself in the woods.
Frank mocked Yurick—though not to his face—for his high intelligence, his seriousness, and his solitary nature, all of which set him apart. Our teachers admired Yurick’s studiousness; he was a role model for always having the right answer, and that caused him to be a greater target of ridicule to the other students. His intelligence was also a sign of strength, and his ability to succeed on his own made him singular. We bonded over our being geeks and loners. We often hiked together, usually in silence, except when Yurick identified a bird (“That’s a phoebe—they love insects”), or a spot of nature (“This is a fiddlehead fern—you can eat them”). My love was for the physical sciences, Yurick was a math whiz and could solve algebraic equations in his head.
There we were, two Littleford misfits, tramping through the Fells, wishing we were older and far away from Littleford. I have mentioned the story that Frank appropriated, how Yurick cut his hand one day, sliced it with a hunting knife he was using to lop twigs off a branch, slashing the meat of his thumb. I bandaged it and helped him home. His father gave me twenty dollars as a graduation present.
After high school I didn’t see him. Yurick went to college and so did I. But he stayed away from Littleford. For years I never heard his name. He was a friend from long ago, one of those pals you grow up with, who disappear.
But Yurick reemerged in another dimension. I began seeing his name in news stories, when I was looking in the financial pages, studying copper prices or bauxite futures, or—as when I’d returned from the Congo—I was researching cobalt prices. Yurick was often a headline in business news, the hedge fund, Yurick Venture Capital, Yurick Industries, the trading conglomerate Yurick Global, the news division, Yurick Digital Media.
Yurick had such clout, I imagined partnering with him to look at mineral prospects—his funding my travel and research, his investing in a mine I’d run. I wrote to him several times, with proposals—Remember me, Melvin? He always replied in a friendly but offhand way—brief, brisk, showing no interest. We must get together sometime, he wrote with studied vagueness, a tactic for deflecting me, being nice but noncommittal.
I once showed one of these letters to Frank, who pretended to be unimpressed, an obvious concealment that proved he was dazzled and envious. He later asked me—trying to be casual—if I could give him Yurick’s address or phone number. But knowing how predatory Frank could be—and anyway I hated him—I told him in an equally casual way that I’d lost his contact details. Maybe just write him in care of his company. I’m sure he’d remember you.
That was my tease. For Frank, for everyone I knew, Melvin Yurick was unapproachable, far too remote and grand to respond. And he would have remembered the high school taunts, his solitude in Littleford. We’d been friends long ago, but he was too severe, too ambitious, to be sentimental about a small town that had been indifferent to him, yet he was generous in funding local projects, philanthropy from afar. He lived in the big world now, of Yurick Global and Yurick Digital, he owned many houses, including a mansion in New York City—and, oh, yes, he was now a multibillionaire.
Frank had sometimes asked about him. I always replied, “Mel? I hear from him now and then. Great guy. He talks about investing in mining and maybe using my expertise.
A dishonest boast, but credible enough to impress Frank, who knew Yurick and I had been friends.
I now owed Frank more money, for house repairs, appliances, taxes, and his legal fees, than I would ever be able to pay back. I owed thousands to Miss Milgrim, having paid just a fraction of her huge fee for dealing with Frank’s demands. I’m underwater, people say of their debt. It’s an accurate image: I was sinking and suffocating.
I was still living in the small room at the top of the house, as far from Victor and Amala as I could get, avoiding them whenever possible, and mildly shocked when I saw Amala, who often had a new tattoo—neck blotch, wrist blotch, blotches on fingers and toes—and hairdos that ranged from tightly braided (“cornrows” she explained) and dreadlocks to—most recently—a mohawk. She had put on weight, she wore billowy Buddhist dresses and black lipstick. Rejected by Frank, and in an uneasy relationship with Victor, she refused to be unhappy, making a hobby of her body and knitting. But I found a great deal to admire in Amala’s strategies to remain serene. She burned aromatic candles, she practiced yoga breathing, she chanted.
Except for passing messages from Frank to me, Victor was unemployed. I got a letter or a memo almost every day, usually tucked under my door and poked into my room. I had stopped reading them. There were so many of them, like bills headed overdue, they had no meaning except punishment. I let the envelopes accumulate, I stacked them on a shelf at first, and when the pile became unsteady I crammed them into a drawer. I didn’t want Frank’s words in my head.
A new plan formed in my mind. After my pondering the stages of justifiable fratricide, I began to put it into action.
My first move was to remind Frank of Melvin Yurick, my old friend, now immensely wealthy and philanthropic and influential, someone a lawyer on the make would want to meet. In the archives of the Littleford Standard I found a photograph of Melvin and me in our Boy Scout uniforms, aged twelve or thirteen, standing together at a town event, hoisting a flag on the town green, Melvin tugging what he knew to be a halyard, while I saluted. I photocopied it and gave it to Victor to pass on to Frank, using it as an excuse to distract him from dunning me with invoices. I wrote on the back of the photo that Yurick had a regional office in Boston. I said I was in talks with him on various projects that would help me settle matters with Frank, moneywise.
Frank did not respond to this message or the photo. This meant he was dazzled, but stumped for a reply. Frank’s silences were more meaningful and eloquent than when he actually spoke. It was felt by Frank’s clients and adversaries that he was adept at concealing his motives or strategies. But I knew better: it was never concealment. Experience had shown me that most of the time he had no idea what his true motive was.
I wonder what Frank’s thinking, someone would say. I wish I knew.
What they had not considered was that Frank himself did not know what he was thinking. Liars, cheats, trimmers, and crooks are habitual improvisors.
Maybe he was waiting for a sign. Being unscrupulous, he had no settled beliefs, except a compulsion for self-advancement. He had no conscience, he was not guided by any ethical code. He was purely an opportunist, waiting for a chance to pounce, but he could never tell you what it was he really wanted, because he wanted everything. Someone who wants everything has no direction, and is easily distracted, and never satisfied.
A visit for lunch by Melvin Yurick would be my distraction. But another element was needed.
I called Paco Zorrilla.
“Hermano!” he cried out. “Nice to hear your voice.” Before I could ask him a question he said, “I’ll call you back on a better line,” and did so a few minutes later, because (I assumed) he was not sure his phone was secure. On this new call, he said, “What can I do for you, amigo?”
I said, “I have money worries, but I’ll be fine.”
“We send you money! How much you need?”
“Too much—don’t send me money,” I said. “Send me some product.”
“What product?”
“Mexican valium. Rohypnol.”
“Roofies,” he said. “How many?”
“It’s not business. I only need a handful.”
“That’s easy. Give me an address—I’ll have someone drop them off. But listen, amigo. If you have a problem, I want you to stay in touch. We can help you.”
“I’ll need your help,” I said. “Give me a good number and I’ll keep you posted. I’ll need to hide at some point.”
“We help you disappear. We make magic.”
I gave him my address and hung up and had my first doubts. We help you disappear had done it. Until hearing that I’d been certain of what I wanted to do—kill Frank. But now I had another option: I could turn my back on him and the whole business, simply vanish, leaving my debts and entanglements behind.
For a day or two, awaiting the delivery of the roofies, I debated calling Paco Zorrilla again and asking him to arrange my disappearance. But just as I was to call, and vanish, Victor pushed another letter from Frank under my door.
In this, he claimed that he’d gotten more copies of my tax returns—implying that Vita had found them—and he said that as I had not reported my true worldwide income for the past ten years, he was passing the returns to the IRS, along with the bank statements he’d discovered in his asset search, noting the discrepancies, “and all that that implies. Draw your own conclusion.”
If what he said was true, and he ratted me out, he would get a reward, and I would face a heavy fine and jail time. Having been confined for months in Tower House, I had an inkling of the torments of the sort of captivity that might be enforced by a plague or pandemic.
Was I in arrears? as he said. I had no way of knowing. I’d had to list all my foreign bank accounts when I split up with Vita. Frank had used these accounts in his asset search. Maybe he’d held back some of his findings to have something to punish me with later.
The fact that, after more than thirty years of mining successfully in the U.S. and around the world, I was deep in debt, living in Littleford and without a clear path forward, testified to my careless bookkeeping. I’d always reasoned that if I kept working and turning a profit I’d be fine. But my divorce, my lack of work, and my dispute with Frank over ownership of the house had knocked me sideways. I owed money I didn’t have and, worse than that, it was possible that Frank might make good on his threats, in which case I’d end up in jail, disgraced, ruined.
Something else bothered me, an apparently slight thing, but full of significance. It was Amala. Often Victor was invited to have dinner with Frank and Frolic, and out of loyalty, or because he was browbeaten by Frank—reminded that he was living free in the house—he went to these dinners alone, leaving Amala behind.
One of those evenings, scheming to kill Frank, I passed by the kitchen and saw Amala sitting at the dining table. I said hello and lingered in the doorway.
She looked up. “Hi, Cal.”
She was smiling; I saw a peacefulness in her eyes. And she’d changed her appearance. In the past she varied her hairdos, cornrows, dreadlocks, shaved the side of her head, braided what was on top and mounded the braids and gave them a tail that flopped down her back, as though she was wearing the corpse of a hairy animal on her head.
Now her whole head was shaved. On the nape of her exposed neck she had a new tattoo, a possibly spiritual image, but to me the sort of ink that makes a person unemployable except as a garage mechanic. She had a small dull-colored nose ring, pierced through her septum. She was heavier than when I’d last seen her and dressed in a simple smock. I’d interrupted her drinking a cup of green tea and poring over the dense text of a book.
Most of her adornment was new. I’d regarded her as a shy simple soul, but she’d transformed herself, become a conspicuous presence, big and bald.
“New look,” I said.
“I’m studying to become an ani.”
“Right,” I said. “Where’s Vic?”
“His dad’s house. They’ve got stuff to discuss.”
Idle, unemployed, feckless people become ingenious in making excuses. No one is more creative in procrastinating than a truly lazy person.
“An ani is a bird,” I said.
“It’s a nun.”
“Right,” I said. A nun? “Anything I can do for you?”
“I’m good,” she said. “I’m almost finished with this sutra. We could hang out.”
“I’ve got some unfinished business.”
Shaved as though for a delousing, her baldness—her piercings and tattoos—should have made Amala seem sadder, lost and left behind, another of Frank’s prisoners. Yet she was serene, her whole head glowing, sitting in a relaxed and peaceful posture, her legs drawn up under her, while I mounted the stairs to my room in a heightened, indignant state of homicidal rage.